The Story of Palin and Paul Revere

RUSH: Here’s Bob in the Bronx as we hit the phones next. Bob, welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hi. Thank you, Rush. Longtime listener, longtime supporter.

RUSH: Great to have you here, sir.

CALLER: Thank you. Hey, Rush, I’m calling because you weren’t on the air yesterday, but I had tuned into Chris Wallace’s show on Sunday and Sarah Palin was the guest, and she just was phenomenal, phenomenal. And again, it shows you of course how the mainstream media twists and pulls the truth in what she says is, and they’ve been all over her for saying something about, “The British are coming,” and Paul Revere’s ride and everything else, and she has explained that that’s exactly what happened, that she knew exactly what she was talking about. And here, Rush — again, this is my comment, then I’d like to give you a question. But she is an intelligent, viable candidate if and when she does decide to run. I really feel that, again, the entire nation is being blackballed by what she is not compared to what she is.

RUSH: Is that an opinion you are giving or are you asking me if I think she’s a viable candidate?

CALLER: Well, that is my comment, first of all, and then actually my question to you would be: If she were to run, do you think she would be a viable candidate to this Obama?

RUSH: They’re trying to destroy her, but I just saw a poll somewhere. It’s either Fox or MSNBC ’cause those are the two networks on in here right now —

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: — and this poll said that 41% of Republicans don’t want her to get the nomination.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: I don’t know what the poll is.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: I don’t know what it is. I remember we had during the midst of this bus trip, a call from Vinny in Queens. I don’t know if you heard it, but I got a little bit ticked off at Vinny ’cause Vinny was willing to throw her overboard simply because the media has successfully destroyed her.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: He said he didn’t want her, and there are a lot of people like this.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: I’m running into a lot of woman who can’t stand her. Women cannot stand her; they hate her. Republican women. I mean it is visceral and it’s intensifying, and one of the things about this that does bother me is that we have people on our side say, “Rush, the media has destroyed her! I don’t want to mess with somebody the media’s already destroyed. She’s guaranteed to lose. I love Sarah Pali, she’s very right on, but the media’s just destroyed her,” aand when I hear people say that, I say, “Okay, well, what are you gonna do when they destroy Romney, and what are you gonna do when they destroy Pawlenty, and what are you gonna do when they destroy Santorum?

“What are you gonna do when they destroy Herman Cain?” At what point, if you’re gonna sit around and wait for the Republican they don’t destroy or don’t try to…? “I don’t know, Rush, there’s nothing we can do about it. I mean, they set out to destroy her, and they have. She’s damaged goods. It’s just not possible. People hate her. She’s too vitriolic, she’s too polarizing and so forth.” You know, what bothers me about it is that I’m just sick and tired of the media winning that way. Where is our side saying, “To hell with you destroying our side”? So it tells me that some people don’t mind her being destroyed on our side, they just casually let it go, because they don’t like her for one reason or another.

Now, this Paul Revere business. I happen to know, folks, a lot about Paul Revere. I happen to know a lot about this. Well, you will soon see why I know a lot about Paul Revere. I’m not stringing you along at all, and let me tell you this Palin thing with Paul Revere. To read about this is just fascinating, because she was right as far as it goes. Paul Revere started his midnight ride as everybody — well, I can’t say “everybody knows, but as most people were taught — to warn, “The British are coming! The British are coming,” and that happened? What did Palin do? She’s out there, she comes out of the church, the press, talking about Paul Revere? Oh, yeah, Paul Revere. He warned the British. He warned the British.

“They’re not gonna take our guns away from us, those bells are gonna be ringing out there.” People said, “Oh, my God, what an idiot! They think Paul Revere was warning the British! My God,” and they went nuts. Now, what happened was that Paul Revere got captured. Paul Revere was captured — and while in captivity, he did warn the British, “You ain’t gonna get away with this. We know that you’re here. Everybody knows. You’re not gonna be able to disarm us. The bells are gonna be ringing out there, and you’re not gonna surprise anybody.” So she was right. So they went to the historians, the highly respected historians, and to read this was just as humorous as it could be.

The historians in Boston that the news media found had to begrudgingly admit that she was right, but as one of them said (this is classic), “It wasn’t due to scholarship. Mrs. Palin accidentally got this right.” They made it very clear that very few people really know that Paul Revere, in fact, did warn the British after he was captured. They think that she was either drunk or tired or whatever because they believe she actually said, “I can see Russia from my house.” They believe she told Katie Couric. They believe this. So they think that she committed a faux pas, that happened to turn out to be right, so they’re saying, “Yes, yes. Actually she’s correct about this, but it’s not due to scholarship.”

Meaning it’s not because she knew it, it’s because she just happened to say it. “She got lucky,” in fact one of them said. “She got very lucky here in her response.” If you look at the tape of Palin saying it, it’s filled with Palinisms — these Palinisms that rub people wrong. When she says, for example, “They’re gonna be ringing those bells!” people think that’s very unsophisticated to speak that way. “They’re ringing those bells out there.” But in fact the church bells were going to be rung and she was right. I’m not defending her. That’s not the point of this. But when the story first hit you could just see it. The first version of it I saw is Andrew Malcolm, who I like.

He’s got the blog at the LA Times, and Andrew Malcolm ran the story, and without saying it in his own words the implication (well, the inference as a reader) was clear “Uh-oh! Oh, my God, how could you possibly think that Paul Revere warned the British? My God, what an idiot! Oh, it’s confirmed everything everybody ever thought of her,” and you keep reading, you read the comments, and the last comment — and at the time I saw this there must have been must have been 12 or 13 comments. The last comment was from a guy, “Actually, she’s right. It happened, and she was right.” The real story is that nobody knew it. Nobody knew that Paul Revere actually warned the Brits, too. Nobody stopped to think of when he got captured.

The story of Paul Revere as far as most people know is he’s riding through town, warning, “The British are coming! The British are coming,” and that’s it. They don’t know he got captured. They don’t know the story of what he did in captivity, how he did warn them. So it was just funny to watch all this fall out. The critics laughing at her had no clue themselves what had really happened. Yeah, “The regulars are coming,” and then when they went to the scholars, the scholars begrudgingly, “Yes, Mrs. Palin is right about this, but it wasn’t due to scholarship,” meaning, “She’s still an idiot, she’s always an idiot, and this doesn’t mean that she’s not an idiot. She just lucked into this. Damn it!” The whole thing was just to me hilarious as it could be. It is what it is with her. But, my friends, in terms of whether she get the nomination, I have no clue. All I know is that when I run into more and more Republican women, the hatred for Sarah Palin is visceral. They just don’t like her. I don’t pretend to understand it.

Well, I know I explained it once, but it’s a form of irrationality that I can’t hold onto for very long. Can’t.

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RUSH: You remember there was another occasion where Palin was laughed at and mocked. She was talking to a Tea Party crowd and about waiting for the November election to come up, you know, party like it’s 1773. And of course the media went nuts, “Oh, yeah, 1773, yeah, Sarah Palin, Declaration of Independence, she doesn’t even know what year the Declaration –” and, of course, 1773 was the year of the Boston Tea Party. She’s talking to an audience of Tea Party people, 1773 is a relevant date. Again, she knew what she was talking about. The smart people had no clue what she was talking about and assumed she’s an idiot.

So when you start out assuming somebody’s a blithering idiot, everything she says is going to end up being a blithering idiot. And again, these are the smart people. I’ve had had so many people tell me they think that she’s stupid. But the only reason they think that is because of what they’re being told by these pompous asses in the media who hold themselves out as the arbiters of smart and who themselves are brain-dead ignoramuses when it comes to basic facts. And of course Obama thinks Hirohito was on the deck of the USS Missouri signing the surrender treaty with MacArthur, and he thinks there are 57 states. Well, those are just slips of the tongue.

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RUSH: I have a quick question. I just asked Snerdley this, folks. If there were a modern-day Paul Revere, either on his bus or a horse riding through town, what would he be shouting? The original Paul Revere, the Redcoats are coming, the British are coming, what would the modern day Paul Revere be saying? (laughing) It wouldn’t be the ChiComs are coming. It wouldn’t be the Russians are coming. What would it be?

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RUSH: Paul in Charlotte, North Carolina, great to have you, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, 24/7 dittos, man.

RUSH: Thank you. Appreciate it.

CALLER: Yeah, I think you can use a historical device or historical tool or analytics tool used by historians to actually prove that Sarah Palin didn’t make a slip of the tongue, right? Rhetorical criticism you start with what was said, then take it to its larger context. What she said was Paul Revere warned the British, et cetera, et cetera, about the forthcoming doom. Well, her entire tour, bus tour has been about throwing off government, the shackles of government, and basically being a warning to Americans about the greatness we had and what’s coming, to throw off the shackles of government. So the fact she said what she said fits perfectly inside of her overall thematic bus tour, which kinda makes her kind of like Paul Revere.

RUSH: Well, yeah. The purpose of the bus tour has been to expand people’s historical knowledge of the country as well, and particularly her family’s. Now, she happens to go into a place where they tell her about the midnight ride of Paul Revere and everything that happened. So she comes out, and the press, as always, eager to trip her up, (paraphrasing) “Well, what did you learn, Ms. Palin?” “Well, Paul Revere, warned the British, gonna ring those bells,” the press goes nuts. She probably had just been told by the people at the museum or wherever it was that she went, the historical site, what had happened, either she didn’t know it before she went or did, whatever, it was probably something she had learned, been taught at whatever point, was repeating it.

But because of the arrogance of the media who think they know it all and you start with the premise she doesn’t know anything, so whatever she says immediately you chalk it up, she’s stupid and uninformed and so forth, because that narrative or that template for her is already out there, so it is what it is. And she turns out in this case to be right, but they just can’t handle that, so her being right wasn’t due to scholarship. She just got lucky, it’s what they say, she just got lucky.

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RUSH: Here’s Pam in Rolla, Missouri. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. Thanks for letting me be on your show.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about one Republican woman’s perspective on Sarah Palin.

RUSH: Oh. Okay, good.

CALLER: I’m not couple years older than Sarah and I have only four kids, but I think with Sarah Palin for me, there is this transferred feeling of mistrust or misgiving which probably has been shifted onto her instead of being placed on the party structure or the GOP hierarchy, which might be its proper place.

RUSH: What do you mean, “misgiving”? What do you m ean mistrust, misgiving? What do you mean? For her?

CALLER: Well, have you ever been through the conventional, the caucus convention process as a delegate, Rush?

RUSH: I have not, no.

CALLER: Okay. Well, I would say that my experience in 2008 was definitely not that it was gonna be grassroots or bottom-up, as I had hoped, but that it turned out to be a lot of top-down.

RUSH: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

CALLER: And I feel that there’s a lot of back room king-making that goes on.

RUSH: Okay, I got 30 seconds. How does that affect Palin? What does that have to do with her?

CALLER: Well, Sarah Palin was felt to be acceptable by the GOP hierarchy, as a running mate for a man who, granted, has a recurrence of a very bad type of cancer — a man in his seventies — and so what was it about Sarah Palin that these back room kingmakers thought was very acceptable? Did they think that she was really aligned with their ideology or that she could be easily swayed over to their ideology? It’s maybe not so much that I, you know, have anything personally against Sarah Palin, but I just wonder. These people don’t make these kinds of decisions for no reason at all, and I wonder why.

RUSH: You know, that’s interesting, because I don’t remember the hierarchy of the Republican Party liking her at all from the get-go. That’s what I remember. Gosh, I wish I had more time with you, but I don’t.

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RUSH: Yeah, I remember the GOP hierarchy being shocked about Palin. I’m gonna tell you this, though: If she runs and if she gets the nomination, she’s gonna end up being the one to beat. You mark my words on this. All this stuff notwithstanding.

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